Alumni's app helps student-athletes manage hectic lives

Former Duke football player Zach Maurides designed an app to help other student-athletes.
Former Duke football player Zach Maurides designed an app to help other student-athletes.

After struggling to balance academic and athletic workloads as a student, alum Zach Maurides—a former Duke football player—has created a mobile application designed to help student-athletes around the country.

As a freshman, Maurides, Duke '07, was juggling schoolwork and a hectic training schedule, and he often found it hard to keep up. Maurides recalled that he would often forget his schedule and double-book, or show up late and completely miss everything. The punishment for being late or forgetting something for football was running stadium stairs—at four in the morning.

"I ran enough of them to know that I wanted to solve the problem," Maurides said.

To help student athletes manage their hectic schedules, Maurides developed Teamworks, a mobile app that improves coordination and communication between athletes and their coaches, with co-founder Shaun Powell. The app compiles equipment inventory and personnel information, manages team travel and creates schedules that can be viewed by both the coach and the student.

Teamworks has amassed close to 800 clients since it first started in 2006, when Maurides was still a student. Included in the client list is Duke athletics—along with the football teams of peer schools such as University of North Carolina and Stanford University, conferences such as the Big Ten and professional organizations such as the San Francisco 49ers.

Much of Maurides' difficulty in managing his schedule as a student-athlete came from a structural deficiency in how Duke football, as well as many other athletics programs, were organized at the time, Maurides said. Often, athletes and their coaches were not on the same page. The administrators booking his schedule didn't always know what other commitments he had, leading to double bookings and other scheduling conflicts.

"We solved that by, at the very least, giving them access to the full picture, so they could find times that made both of our schedules more efficient as well as use Teamworks to automatically remind us ahead of time," Maurides said.

Kevin Lehman, Duke's director of football operations, said that Teamworks has been a great asset to the Blue Devil football program, especially during the recent cancellations due to snow.

“We had a plan based on what a normal operating day was like for us,” Lehman said. “But the moment we find out school is being delayed, we had to immediately look at our players’ availabilities and put together a new schedule in the limited time frame that we had. Teamworks takes care of all of that stuff for us.”

In 2011, Teamworks worked with Duke athletics to quantify the monetary benefit the University has gained from using Teamworks software. The study found that Duke’s return on investment was 345 percent, and that Teamworks had saved Duke more than $240,000 in more efficient time usage and less paper usage, said Mitch Moser, chief financial officer for Duke athletics.

The idea for the Teamworks platform stemmed from an assignment Maurides had in an Information Science and Information Studies at Duke. The inspiration for his project later became the inspiration for his business.

“I was taking an ISIS course at the time,” he said. “We were talking about emerging web technologies and one of our assignments was to come up with a concept for a software service application that would benefit us in our lives."

Maurides added that support from his family was instrumental to him developing his vision.

“My father is very entrepreneurial,” Maurides said. “During one of our phone calls, I mentioned the project I was working on. He said that he thought it was a great idea, and that if I had that problem there was a good chance sports programs around the country had it as well, so you should build it. He really encouraged me to go out onto the path of building it and making it into a real product.”

He also added that the Duke athletic community was extremely responsive to his efforts and helped him further figure out how exactly his company would operate.

“From there, I took a great amount of time to scope out the market,” Maurides said. “And I conducted interviews with representatives from various areas within Duke athletics and turned that into functional specifications.”

After he graduated from Duke, Maurides went to work as a program analyst for software company SciQuest, at which he had interned while a student. He worked there for two years before deciding that he wanted to further develop Teamworks, so he decided to enroll in the Master of Management Studies program at the Fuqua School of Business.

After two quarters in the program, however, Maurides was getting good grades but felt he was not fully engaged with either his academics or Teamworks as he tried to juggle them both.

“I sat down with [then-vice dean] Kathie Amato, who was running that program, and I just said that I felt like I was serving two masters,” Maurides said. “Her advice was to take a leave of absence and go develop my business. If it worked out, I wouldn't need to come back, and if it didn't, I still could. It was selfless advice, and it was right advice that I needed to hear at the time.”

In the future, Maurides envisions being able to market Teamworks to departments outside of athletics.

“We think this can apply to employee groups," Maurides said. "Some universities have reached out to us about putting their campus safety officers on this. If something were to happen on East Campus, for example, Teamworks could send out a message to all [Graduate Assistants] and [Resident Assistants] and ask someone to get it sorted out.”

This article has been updated to better reflect Stanford and the University of North Carolina's use of Teamworks.

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